Labor's Kate Washington has appealed to the Clerk of the NSW Parliament to investigate.

ABC News: Dan Cox

A New South Wales Labor MP has taken action against what she believes are fake Facebook profiles trolling her and influencing voters against her.

Kate Washington, from the seat of Port Stephens in the Hunter region, told AM it was a worrying development with the state election coming up in March.

"Over the last six months, we've seen a relentless number of fake Facebook profiles commenting constantly across all of our issues and across a whole lot of different Facebook pages, including my own and local newspapers."

"They are comments designed to manipulate and misinform other people in those platforms. And they are used to attack me constantly, whilst promoting the Liberal candidate and the Government's slogans."

Kate Washington and her team said the four profiles appeared to represent local constituents but were actually fake.

They pointed to a number of pieces of evidence to show the profiles were not genuine.

Firstly, she said, they had evidence showing that the names linked to the fake profiles were not registered on the electoral roll.

And the team said it found one of the profile's photos matched with that of a man in Illinois in the United States, after using reverse Google imaging.

Language with a political agenda

"The language they use is not the language of normal people; they use very campaign-slogan type language," Ms Washington said.

"There's no other activity these people do in their daily lives, it is only political commentary. And across the different Facebook profiles, the messaging all the same," she said.

"I'm concerned not only about how it might influence outcome here in Port Stephens in terms of the election. But also concerned about what it does to undermine debate in politics," she said.

But Liberal party representatives the ABC approached said they had no knowledge of the profiles and that there was no evidence to support Ms Washington's claims.

One Liberal member said she too was subject to trolling from fake accounts and just tried to ignore them.

Facebook trying to eliminate fake profile

The ABC has also contacted Facebook about the alleged fake profiles and the social media giant confirmed it was investigating.

The profiles appear to have been deleted since the ABC, other journalists and Facebook started investigating them this week.

A spokesperson for Facebook said fake accounts were against its policy and the company removed millions of them each day.

The spokesperson also said it was working hard to protect the security of Australia's upcoming election campaigns, and had bolstered its team of people dedicated to investigating such cases.

It comes as the Australian Electoral Commission works with Twitter and Facebook to ensure all electoral communication (communication that can affect voters) on social media sites comes from legitimate sources.

Influencing the narrative through 'astroturfing'

Dr Andrew Hughes, who specialises in political advertising at the Australian National University, said this could be a case of what is called "astroturfing".

Astroturfing is the process of creating the look of a grassroots campaign, when in reality the campaign has been fabricated.

"So not trying to influence the entire election campaign, but more trying to influence and direct a narrative on an issue," Dr Hughes said.

He said one of the tell tale signs of this strategy was the overuse of political language and the absence of any other postings or likes by the Facebook profile.

He's worried this strategy could become more widely used in Australia with the upcoming state and federal elections.

"That's indicative of the fact that we probably need to update electoral laws in Australia to minimise this type of influence," he said.

"At the same time, it's also up to some of the social media brands out there to crack down on this sort of behaviour, which they could do, once they're alerted to it.